Ideas-wagons tend they travel the world the driver hooks them in his effort keeps them travel terrible roads so accompanied and so alone his work runs through suffering the meditation the joy passes / between gala dances / village fairs the desire is pursued more everyday spiders weave in the bedroom / its circular tape the years freeze hair / things oxidize kill love Or time?
A captivating experiment in traditional poetic form, from one of the most untraditional American poets ever to set pen to paper At first glance, John Ashbery’s Shadow Train seems to embrace the constraints of traditional poetic form—but closer reading reveals that this work is Ashbery at his revolutionary best. In fifty poems, each consisting solely of four connected quatrains, Ashbery apparently plays by the rules while simultaneously violating every single one. Over and over again, the familiar, almost sonnet-like sixteen-line form creates an outline of a poem within which, one would expect, poetry is meant to arrive—as a station waits for a train. And yet, as with many of the world’s greatest poems, the act of creating poetry also relies on the reading and the reader—in other words, as this collection’s signature poem “Paradoxes and Oxymorons” puts it, “the poem is / you.” In Shadow Train, Ashbery demonstrates how language influences our experience of reality, creating it and sustaining it while also remaining mysterious and ineffable: constantly arriving, but impossible to catch.
A picture book about an old train station from a bygone era. The golden age of the railroad may have passed, but its legacy still fascinates us. Based on a song by the acclaimed musician Gordon Titcomb, The Last Train is a beautiful celebration of that bygone era. Titcomb's lyrics are matched by Wendell Minor's handsome, richly-detailed paintings. ALL ABOARD! "What a gorgeous tribute this is that preserves as it distills for future generations the life of a little railroad station."—Arlo Guthrie
An adorable picture book full of sibilant sounds and other word play, Snakes on a Train is as fun for parents as it is for kids, and sure to be a read-aloud hit. The conductor takes the tickets as the snakes start crawling on. The tracks are checked, the whistle blows. It's time to move along. Hissssssssssss goes the sound of the train.
In 1943, General Thadeus Dreyer, a WWI hero who trains doubles for Nazi leaders, disappears. In 1960, Adolf Eichmann, a master chess player, is arrested in Buenos Aires, extradited to Israel, and hanged. Years later, a dying Polish count casts doubt on Eichmann's identity, leaving behind a manuscript with clues that tie the three men together. A gripping novel of imposture and identity, Shadow Without a Name is a harrowing parable of our century of chaos, where individual will is swamped by the cult of personality and destinies hang on a game of chess.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the National Book Award–winning author of Just Kids: a “sublime collection of true stories … and wild imaginings that take us to the very heart of who Patti Smith is” (Vanity Fair), told through the cafés and haunts she has worked in around the world. Patti Smith calls this bestselling work “a roadmap to my life.” M Train begins in the tiny Greenwich Village café where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. Through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, we travel to Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul in Mexico; to the fertile moon terrain of Iceland; to a ramshackle seaside bungalow in New York’s Far Rockaway that Smith acquires just before Hurricane Sandy hits; to the West 4th Street subway station, filled with the sounds of the Velvet Underground after the death of Lou Reed; and to the graves of Genet, Plath, Rimbaud, and Mishima. Woven throughout are reflections on the writer’s craft and on artistic creation. Here, too, are singular memories of Smith’s life in Michigan and the irremediable loss of her husband, Fred Sonic Smith. Braiding despair with hope and consolation, illustrated with her signature Polaroids, M Train is a meditation on travel, detective shows, literature, and coffee. It is a powerful, deeply moving book by one of the most remarkable multiplatform artists at work today. Featuring a postscript with five new photos from Patti Smith
Once, Special Agent Smoky Barrett hunted serial killers for the FBI. She was one of the best—until a madman terrorized her family, killed her husband and daughter, and left her face scarred and her soul brutalized. Turning the tables on the killer, Smoky shot him dead—but her life was shattered forever. Now Smoky dreams about picking up her weapon again. She dreams about placing the cold steel between her lips and pulling the trigger one last time. Because for a woman who’s lost everything, what is there left to lose? She’s about to find out. In all her years at the Bureau, Smoky has never encountered anyone like him—a new and fascinating kind of monster, a twisted genius who defies profilers’ attempts to understand him. And he’s issued Smoky a direct challenge, coaxing her back from the brink with the only thing that could convince her to live. The killer videotaped his latest crime—an act of horror that left a child motherless—then sent a message addressed to Agent Smoky Barrett. The message is enough to shock Smoky back to work, back to her FBI team. And that child awakens something in Smoky she thought was gone forever. Suddenly the stakes are raised. The game has changed. For as this deranged monster embarks on an unspeakable spree of perversion and murder, Smoky is coming alive again–and she’s about to face her greatest fears as a cop, a woman, a mother . . . and a merciless killer’s next victim.
A fifteen-year-old boy named Jordan, who is lost in the wind, runs away from home to escape the miserable existence he was living. On his journey of riding the rails, he learns how to survive life on the road in a very treacherous world. He discovers a society of free spirits, lost souls, and hostile enemies, who would kill you with the blink of an eye. Bolt is one of those evil beings with his intimidating, purple-tattooed face. And so begins this hallowed adventure for this young street kid named Jordan who is hopping trains, having to watch his back, staying out of the clutches of the railroad bulls, avoiding freezing to death in the bitter cold, and learning who to trust. This is the story of Riding Trains.
John Hollander, poet and scholar, was a master whose work joined luminous learning and imaginative risk. This book, based on the unpublished Clark Lectures Hollander delivered in 1999 at Cambridge University, witnesses his power to shift the horizons of our thinking, as he traces the history of shadow in British and American poetry from the Renaissance to the end of the twentieth century. Shadow shows itself here in myriad literary identities, revealing its force as a way of seeing and a form of knowing, as material for fable and parable. Taking up a vast range of texts—from the Bible, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton to Poe, Dickinson, Eliot, and Stevens—Hollander describes how metaphors of shadow influence our ideas of dreaming, desire, doubt, and death. These shadows of poetry and prose fiction point to unknown, often fearful domains of human experience, showing us concealed shapes of truth and possibility. Crucially, Hollander explores how shadows in poetic history become things with a strange substance and life of their own: they acquire the power to console, haunt, stalk, wander, threaten, command, and destroy. Shadow speaks, even sings, revealing to us the lost as much as the hidden self. An extraordinary blend of literary analysis and speculative thought, Hollander’s account of the substance of shadow lays bare the substance of poetry itself.
OUT OF WORK AND OUT OF LUCK. In Don Brown's The Train Jumper Ed "Collie" Collier encounters hobos, misers, racists, and even some kindness while riding the rails during the Great Depression. Collie leaves home in search of his older brother, who has run off. Battling hunger, hostility, and wrathful weather, he meets an unlikely ally in a young drifter. They jump a freight train, joining thousands and thousands of young boys and men who try riding out the Great Depression by riding the rails.
